People come to forum to complain about content being too hard (vMA, vet dungeons etc).

But I’ve not seen posts (or at least not as many) about asking content to be harder. I just want to counter the narrative a bit, since (I hope) there are many people who want more challenging content they are just less likely to go to forum and say “we’re happy with the difficulty”.

I hope that ZOS doesn’t pay too much attention to them. WoW reduced the difficulty of their MMO by making things more “accessible”. There was a period of time, not that long ago, where many veteran players quit, a lot of videos like “why I quit WoW” were popping up, common theme was, because they didn’t feel like it was challenging, like there was no sense of achievement, it was just spending time working on something and getting it without any sense of accomplishment.

I think Sunspire Trial was a step in a wrong direction. Veteran version of trial is too easy, it’s “pugable” and Hard-mode is not even that much harder. Few months ago when we first cleared Nahvi HM, we had almost whole group wipe at one point, 3 people were left, they ressed everyone, we carried on, one person disconnected for 5 minutes, came back on execute, nobody noticed. In execute 4 people instadied and stayed dead for the whole duration, and it was still good enough for clear. There was no hurray of any kind, just silence. I was disappointed, it was like “yeah whatever we cleared it”. It didn’t require any good organisation and people being on top of their game, it didn’t require skill (only for 3 portal people a bit).

In comparison, vCR+3 had much better feeling of clear, even 1 year after its release, with power creep and tactics refined, it still felt more challenging and you needed better performance from everyone to clear it, and it felt good, and it was interesting to go from one difficulty to another, from +0 to +1 to +2 to +3.

I didn’t play during its release, but I imagine people were really happy to clear it for the first time, and back then you must have needed everyone on top of their game to be able to complete it. How do you guys compare the two Trials? If there are some who cleared CR+3 way back, how did you feel about completing it? And completing vSS HM?

Some might say, there is “Godslayer” if you want hard content. Godslayer is indeed very hard, and only very dedicated people can do it. But there is nothing in between. The gap in difficulty between vSS HM clear and Godslayer is astronomical. It’s like playing a game on “very easy” difficulty and “Godlike” or whatever. For people who want something to progress in, which is not super hardcore, there is not much to do.

I hope I’m not alone in this. Maybe I’m nostalgic. But the raiding I’ve done in other MMOs years ago “Rift, FFXIV” was best raiding experiences I can remember. It used to be that a raid is released and groups progress for 3-4 weeks, less dedicate few months, before clearing and it felt really good to finally clear it.

vSS HM was cleared when? 1-2 days after release? So you go from something that takes 1 day to clear, and next difficulty is Godslayer.